The 111th meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, December 9, 2014 at 8 pm at Parsons The New School, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public. Please note 8 pm starting time.

Peter Maresca on Artists and Anarchy, Origins of the Sunday Comics – 1895 to 1915
Discover the first 20 years of comics, a time when there were no set styles or formats for the medium, when artistic anarchy helped spawn a completely new type of entertainment that would influence popular culture for a century to come. Here is a long-overdue examination of the origins of the American Sunday Comic Strip, the art form that gave birth to modern comics. View rare examples of the seminal work of Outcault, Dirks, Swinnerton, McCay, Herriman, and dozens more known and unknown “Founders of the Funnies.”

Peter Maresca  is a lifelong collector of comic strips and owner of Sunday Press. He was a pioneer in digital entertainment when working for Apple and Macromedia in the 1980s and 90s. In 2003, frustrated by forcing comics onto small, monochromatic cell phone screens, he set out to create, on paper, full broadsheet-sized Sunday comics. His proposals were turned down by major publishers and thus he became an “accidental publisher,”  producing his own reprint collections.  The first was the original-size comic strip volume, Little Nemo in Slumberland, So Many Splendid Sundays, and Sunday Press was born. Nine books and 12 Will Eisner Award nominations later, Sunday Press has assembled the first full-size review of the earliest newspaper comics in Society is Nix, Gleeful Anarchy at the Dawn of the American Comic Strip.